Data privacy, governance and compliance is the top enterprise AI concern in 2026, at 61%, ahead of accuracy at 55%. Procurement now writes data handling, model governance and audit-log access into contracts. A typical enterprise AI RFP puts 25% of the score on security and compliance and another 20% on LLM governance.
Only 1 in 5 organizations has a mature governance model for autonomous agents (Deloitte, 3,235 respondents). The gap is not policy. It is engineering: which identity the agent runs as, what it can touch, what gets logged, who reviews the output, and how you prove all of that to an auditor 18 months later.
Certifications are gates. SOC 2 Type II is the shortlist baseline, ISO 27001 carries weight in healthcare, finance and the public sector, and ISO/IEC 42001 now appears in roughly 40% of EU and 25% of North American enterprise AI RFPs by vendor estimates. Controls bolted on after a pilot rarely survive that scrutiny.